


Prompt Critical

by TheLongDefeat



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: And he's not happy about it, Canon Compliant, F/M, GSR - Freeform, Grissom Discovers his Feelings, S03E21 Playing With Fire, Science metaphors for life, Seasons 2 through 5, s04 butterflied
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:07:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24030295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLongDefeat/pseuds/TheLongDefeat
Summary: "There is something unnatural about holding this distance between them, he is aware of that. They are magnetic materials and they should be fused together, it is what physics dictates, it is the law of the natural world. But man is greater than his nature. Grissom has always said so."
Relationships: Gil Grissom/Sara Sidle
Comments: 5
Kudos: 23





	Prompt Critical

**Author's Note:**

> This story follows Grissom's personal experience of his relationship with Sara, from somewhere in season two through season five, when they become fully involved.

Sara makes him - angry.

He can feel her eyes on him, a cool prickle on the back of his neck. He wishes she wouldn’t look at him. There is something so physical about her, something kinetic, possibly entropic: she is an unstable element, and he can feel the vibrations of her even with his back turned. 

He does not raise his head from the microscope. Catherine would call him cowardly, and she would probably be right. But it isn’t really fear that keeps him pressing his face into the uncomfortable plastic lens, staring at the microscopic fibers until his eyes burn with dryness. It’s anger.

That seems unjustified, yes, he’s aware. And he’s not really sure how to explain it, how to put words to what she’s done wrong. If she’s done anything wrong. It may just be that  _ they’re  _ wrong, that there’s something essential in the dynamism of them where destruction and chaos is a fixed outcome. 

He’s getting esoteric. Catherine would point this out as well. So here’s a metaphor to assist in understanding: he feels most of the time that he is a sand castle. He is built of very carefully measured edges and pressed walls, created with care, an organized structure laboriously formed from random and meaningless sand particles. Each piece of him is arbitrary and unimportant in itself, but when ordered in a very particular way, becomes a functional and predictable whole. As a sand castle, he is forever eroded upon by the winds, by gravity, by the natural design flaws of whomever - whatever - is creating him. So much of his life he spends gently patting his walls, worriedly noticing the crumbling towers. Fortifying his battlements.

Sara Sidle is an ocean wave. She comes in, swift and inexorable and totally uncalled for, and she floods the moat, and beneath the cold salty wash of her he feels himself dissolving, he is aware in a very acute, very painful way that he is actually formed of millions and millions of tiny pieces and she is moving them all, smoothing away the rigid lines to reveal the formless ancient shape of his soul. 

Grissom has built a life of clean right angles and sturdy defenses, and he is proud of it. “Bugman,” they call him, and they laugh, and they say he is a cold hearted person but a very decent man, and they are right. Or he wishes they were. But then she comes, and he is a swirling fractal of sand and briny water and it is all he can do to beat her back, and he feels like a storm, and he feels like he might splinter apart with the force of emotion inside of him. He doesn't have words for this kind of thing; it is not the purpose for which he was designed.

And so he is angry.

“I have the DNA for the Carmichael case.”

“I thought I told you to leave the results on my desk.” His tone is flat, but he is sand and she is the sea: they speak the same language. He feels her silence like the barrel of a gun, and sometimes he wishes she would burst into tears, because then the only socially acceptable response would be to hold her. 

“What is your problem with me?”

His forehead is beginning to throb where he has been pressed against the microscope for too long. Catherine would say that was a good metaphor. “Sara, I don’t have any problem with you.” He lifts his head and he turns and he looks at her. She is standing in the doorway of the lab, and there’s some dirt on her cheek - she must have just got back from processing a scene - and her vest is a little off-center, the standard CSI issue one. One of her shoelaces is untied. Her hair is up in a bun, messy, and a lock of hair curls behind her left ear. She is frowning at him, and her eyes are luminous, too large in her pale face, and although he would of course say she is beautiful - he has said so, back when he was cocky, when the tide was out and he thought he lived in dry land - he finds looking at her to be painful, like staring directly into too bright a light. 

He wonders what she sees as she looks at him. “Okay,” she says, and where is the rage that had her flying in the face of murderers? Where is the passion? His wildcat, his spitfire, but now she is only gazing at him, a trembling sadness in the line of her shoulders that makes him feel so, so tired. 

She turns away.

~*~

He’s got an interesting case with a corpse that looks like it was de-pressurized or died in some kind of anti-gravity environment. It takes her an hour and a half to get to the scene from the time he paged her.

“Woah,” she says, seeing the body, “is that petechial hemorrhaging…?”

“Sara,” he says, not looking up from where he is scraping up blood samples by the poolside. “I’m reassigning you. There’s a B&E on the strip that you’ll be taking over for Nick and he’ll be with me.”

Silence. Silence. Grissom feels the hairs of his arms standing up on end like he’s been electrically charged. “Dare I ask why?” 

He wants to see her outrage so he sits up to look at her. She is standing over him, blocking the sun so her face is in shadow and looking like some kind of furious goddess. “I expect my CSI’s to be reliable. I needed you and you weren’t here.”

She doesn’t argue with him. That is how he knows for certain - he had already known, of course, but now the conclusion is justified, the evidence is definitive. He holds her eye for only another instant, but he sees the regret flash in her face - maybe even guilt - and his throat feels like it’s closing up - he wonders if he is going into anaphylactic shock - and maybe it's rage he’s feeling and maybe it's humiliation and maybe it's just sorrow. 

She had been with her  _ boyfriend _ .

“Go,” Grissom says, and his voice is a snarl; he sees Brass looking over in surprise. “Get out of my sight.”

She obeys.

~*~

He leaves the car running so she has the A/C, and there’s plenty of police around so he squashes his sense of worry about her alone in the running car, defenseless. He will only be a few feet away.

It’s a hit and run, and Grissom is always amazed by the extraordinary damage inflicted upon the human body by automobiles. The bones of the victim’s facial structure are shattered, creating a pulpy mess, only slightly swollen since the woman died so shortly after impact. One of her eyeballs is displaced from the socket but intact - an interesting find. Grissom has a brief impulse to ask if he may collect it, but he is sure her family would object. 

He processes the scene for an hour or so, periodically glancing back at the car where she is sleeping. He would know if she awoke with the same shivering sensitivity of the spider that senses the fly has landed in its web. 

Not that he’s a predator.

A man arrived on the scene a few minutes ago, a business-type from the look of him, and he has a wild expression on his face. Husband? Boyfriend? Grissom side steps the body and edges sideways, ear cocked to hear Brass’ reprimands.

“Nobody can see her right now, Mr. Anderson,” Brass is saying, holding up placating hands. Soothing is not really the detective’s strong suit.

The man stares at Brass, and then looks over his shoulder towards the blanket draped over the mangled corpse of the woman. “Is that Cindy?”

“You’re her husband?”

The man jolts in surprise, turning to look at Grissom, who had scuttled up closely without raising any notice. “No, no,” the man murmurs, running a hand through his hair. “I’m her boss.”

He feels it instantly: a tug on the web. Grissom looks over and sees she is blinking open her eyes. “Excuse me, sir.”

He opens her door before she can, and she really did sleep because she is looking at him with the vague confusion of someone who doesn’t know where they woke up. “Are we at a scene?”

Grissom nods. “Hit and run. Boss just showed up.”

Sara rubs the back of her hand into one of her eyes. The gesture is child-like, and she is looking at him, the other eye still blinking drowsily, and there is a hot, tight feeling somewhere in Grissom’s thorax that makes him worried he may be experiencing a heart palpitation. He wants to touch her. The want is a physical thing, a sharp pull of longing that makes him bite his own tongue. 

Blood floods his mouth, and he swallows it. 

“How long have I been asleep?”

“Two or three hours,” Grissom replies. He has stood frozen in her doorway for too long - it appears odd - so he reaches across her body and depresses the latch of her seatbelt. She would probably stiffen and recoil, but she is still so close to sleep that she lets him pull the seat belt over her arm without resistance. “C’mon,” he says. “Help me finish up.”

Together they make quick work of the remainder of the scene, and he is impressed by her insights and realizes he overlooked a piece of evidence which suggests this may have been a premeditated attack. They pack up the evidence and head back to the lab, and she is quiet on the drive home, her hand resting on the latch of the seat belt buckle. She is a little withdrawn but it feels okay, it feels good to be there with her, no messiness and no pain, just the science, just the livewire intensity of her mind and his mind joined together against a problem. 

He doesn’t understand why she can’t be like this always. 

~*~

Sara is still standing over the glass top table, looking through the photos that she’s already looked through a dozen times. She’s been out of sorts this week, irritable and jumpy. Grissom complained about her to Catherine but Catherine only stared at him like he was an alien lifeform and said, “Cut her a little slack, Gil. She, unlike you, has a heart.” Whatever that meant. 

“I don’t understand,” Sara is saying. She is brooding over the hit-and-run case that turned out to be a domestic violence homicide. “Anderson knew something was wrong. He knew the relationship with her boyfriend wasn’t right. And they had known each other for years.” She looks up at Grissom like this is all his doing, like he’s a playwright and she can’t believe he just killed off her favorite character. “Why didn’t he help her? He said he loved her.”

Grissom looks down through the photographs, glossy rectangular tableaus of the Cindy’s wasted body, of the necklace Mr. Anderson had bought her, of the skid marks on the road. The story is simple and the curtain is closed. Grissom shrugs one shoulder. “He didn’t love her enough.”

Grissom doesn’t look up. He doesn’t have to - the fury and the pain crashes into him, wet and shockingly cold. He feels himself giving way, swirling towards her. A fist of rage closes in his chest. Why does she do this? Why can’t she just be… less? 

She brushes his arm as she rushes past him. Her skin is feverishly warm, and he feels himself glowing afterwards, like she is an uncontrolled nuclear fission and he has just absorbed a blast of ionizing radiation. 

He wonders how long he has left to live.

~*~

He looks for her first in the ambulances, pushing up on his toes and peering over heads to see who is laid out on the stretchers. But she isn’t there. 

Something starts to twist in the middle of him, like a tangle of snakes. His heart is pulsing and it feels like it’s out of rhythm even though he knows this physiologically improbable. Out of the corner of his eye he sees they have brought body bags. Grissom wonders if he is going to faint. 

No. No. He will not jump to conclusions without supporting evidence.

He spots her on the curb, motionless as a rock in the sea of people shuffling urgently back and forth. He sees her, bleeding but sitting there all in one piece, both eyes open, and oh  _ god _ , he can  _ breath _ . 

“Are you okay?” 

“Uh huh.” She isn’t looking at him. For once, he aches to have those eyes on him, that scorching gaze that makes him feel like he is being flayed open, being cooked by x-rays. But her eyes are hollow and he can see that Sara has retreated somewhere deep inside of them, a self of the self, past where he can reach her. He touches her skin and is surprised to find it warm and soft and not the cold waxiness he was somehow expecting. 

He sees her hand, gushing blood, a fragment of glass jutting out of the pad of her thumb. Grissom feels a jolt of horror, almost like nausea, and he wonders if this is how normal people feel when they see gore and injuries, this fluttering in his chest, this cold sweat down his back. “This doesn’t look good.”

“It’s fine,” she says. “Cleanup’s going to be something. We should get started.”

She won’t look at him. She won’t look at him. Her face is drawn, expressionless. Something is shattered inside of her, and suddenly Grissom isn’t sure it was the blast that broke it; maybe it is something that was already there. “You need stitches.”

“I’m fine.”

He doesn’t have words for this, he wishes he had words for this kind of thing but he just doesn’t. And maybe she isn’t an ocean wave and maybe he isn’t a sand castle, because even though he feels himself dissolving into her some part of him is able to acknowledge that, right now, in this particular moment, it is him that is crashing, it is her that is being overcome. 

He turns to the paramedics who are neglecting their duties to his left, demands, “Would you take care of her hand, please?”

Only when he’s home and he finds her blood on trousers does he remember that he called her  _ honey. _

~*~

For her birthday, he buys her a miniature aquaponics system. It is rather large, even in miniature form, so he has it delivered to the lab and when she finds him in the hallway to give him the shoe print comparison on the smash and grab case, he steers them both back towards his office. 

“I want you to go out and look at the scene again, see if you missed an exit point,” he instructs, pulling off his glasses and setting them on his desk.

She deflates a little. It is near the end of shift, and this will put her into overtime on her birthday. But it is her own fault for not working the scene thoroughly enough to begin with.

She is nonetheless an observant criminalist, and her eye alights on the large cardboard box immediately. “What’s that?”

“This,” says Grissom, flipping out a box cutter and cleanly breaking open the package, “is your birthday present.”

She stoops over it and immediately begins investigating. “A water system? What is it?” She pulls the parts out, inspecting each one before moving to the next. “Aquaponics!” she exclaims, and looks up at him, radiant with joy.

Her smile - there really is something - “Fish not included,” he quips. “Will you need help setting it up?”

She shakes her head. “I think I’ll be able to figure it out. I’ve read about them, of course.” She is staring down at it all with a scientist’s eye, and this is one of the things he loves best about her: how sincere and open minded she is in the face of something new. 

Grissom helps her load it into her car. She doesn’t leave right away, though, even after he closes the back seat door and steps away. She is staring at him, not smiling, with that look on her face that makes him feel like he is a squirming insect and she is about to drive a needle through him and tack him on a board. “You won’t get dinner with me,” she says. “But you buy me a birthday present?”

It is non-sequitur; a meaningless question. What comparison is there between the two? He is interested in her as a scientist, as a scholar. Why would he need to date her when he already has the best of her? He feels a flash of anger, and he wishes he could bottle it and give that to her instead. There are no quotations he can think of to adequately capture how furious he is that she has asked him this, how much he wishes she would just leave things be, she would just accept that he is giving her what he has, that he is already sustaining critical structural damage to have her this close. Question the evidence, Sara, but don’t question  _ this _ , don’t peel away at him like he is a blister. “What?” he says.

She shakes her head. She looks sad, and Grissom’s anger is out in a flash, drowned in the truth of her eyes as she drops them to the ground and turns to leave.

For Christmas he buys her a book. 

~*~

“Pin me down.”

He thinks it must be a vector field, this desire, because it is certainly location contingent; standing in the doorway, he had felt the draw only faintly, only the bass-beat hum of yearning that he feels every day. Now, his hands closed around her slender wrists, their eyes fixed upon one another, Grissom is acutely aware of the charge that is moving perpendicular to his own current velocity and exerting an overwhelming attractive force. 

_ God _ , he wants to kiss her. 

“She would’ve struggled.” He’s surprised for an instant how hard she is pulling against him; Grissom overpowers her reflexively, tightening his grip, flexing his arms to force her still. He hears her swallow, and although she has stopped moving she is still pressing against his hold with most of her strength. He feels her radial pulse bounding against his thumbs. “Then she gave up.”

He knows what she is trying to demonstrate with the evidence; she knows he knows. He saw her point as soon as he walked in and he noticed what she was looking at. But he will let her finish this demonstration - it’s good practice for her to explain her process. 

And it’s good practice for him, too, a sort of a test of his resolve - if he can resist her here, pinned down, looking at him like she isn’t sure if she loves or hates him or just wants to fuck him, her hip brushing his thigh, her smell, the sound of her breathing - if he can resist her here, he can resist her anywhere. Grissom carefully releases her wrists and extends his palms parallel to the sheet, bracketing her hips. Leverage. It moves him a fraction of an inch closer to her body. He can feel her breath against his neck. If she shifts forward even an inch, she will be flush against him, and then she’ll have physical, demonstrable proof of his attraction to her. 

But she doesn’t move. 

There is something unnatural about holding this distance between them, he is aware of that. They are magnetic materials and they should be fused together, it is what physics dictates, it is the law of the natural world. But man is greater than his nature. Grissom has always said so. 

~*~

“She’s insubordinate. You shouldn’t put up with her being like that. It’s bad for the whole team.” 

Catherine spears a strawberry with her fork, and Grissom can’t help but find the gesture a little threatening. 

He has made her her favorite breakfast: waffles with strawberries and fresh whipped cream. A placating gesture. He doesn’t want her criticizing his leadership; he depends upon her support, her understanding. Catherine is looking at him without pity, looking at him like he is doing something dishonest. 

Grissom has to answer her. She is not going to let this go. He clears his throat and turns his attention back to his own breakfast. “I don’t know what you want me to do, Catherine. She’s just… passionate. You know how she is.” 

“I  _ do  _ know,” Catherine replies vehemently. “And you know what else I know? I know how you are. And this isn’t like you.”

“What?” Grissom says irritably. “What would you have me do?” he asks again.

“Discipline her.”

Catherine doesn’t mean it the way he takes it, but his autonomic nervous system is faster than his cerebral cortex and he cannot - it is physically impossible to - prevent the flush that spreads from his cheeks down his neck.  _ Pin me down. _ Catherine sees it immediately. 

“You tolerate her behavior because you’re flattered by all her mooning over you.”

Grissom sighs, and pushes his plate away. This is why Catherine will never be a great CSI: she allows her own prior beliefs to inform her interpretation of new evidence. But in this particular case, it is a blessing. “Catherine, she’s a good CSI. She can be a handful but that’s my concern, not yours.” Grissom levels her with a cool stare. “And I’d say I’m just as tolerant of you coming to my home and telling me how to manage my team, and I wouldn't exactly describe you as  _ mooning _ .”

Catherine flinches, chastised and annoyed that Grissom is putting her on the same level as the young, unpredictable Sara Sidle. “I would never speak to my superior in that manner in front of colleagues, and you know it. It’s unprofessional and it sets a bad precedent. You should write her up.”

Grissom resists a sneer, dumping his food into the trash and fixing himself a vodka orange juice to match Catherine’s. She raises a silent brow in surprise. “I write her up and Ecklie will jump all over it. You know he’s been itching to get rid of her for months.”

“Maybe he’s right to.”

It catches him off guard: the level of Catherine’s animosity, certainly, but also the swell of rage Grissom feels, the betrayal. He cares about Catherine - he trusts her. And here she is, trying to tear things apart, trying to hurt somebody he loves. He wonders if she has any idea what she’s doing. “Catherine.” 

His friend looks up at him, and he sees in the widening of her eyes that she perceives the anger radiating off of him. 

“Sara Sidle isn’t going  _ anywhere.  _ This topic is closed.”

Two and a half weeks later, he finds Debbie Marlin folded on the cold tiles of her shower like a puppet with cut strings.

~*~

He feels destabilized. A radical element has been introduced to his closed system, and the organizational structures of him are breaking down, creating erratic outputs. 

Debbie Marlin loved her boyfriend. It is obvious from the photos he’s been studying for the past hour, where she stands arm in arm with him, glowing with happiness. He was young, vibrant, warm. Or at least that is how Grissom imagines him. Somebody who is - liberated, whose love flows freely, like blood from a wound. Not like - him. 

He wants to catch the killer, to make them pay. But what keeps him trapped in this house is not the hunger for justice but the hunger for understanding: he has to know exactly why she died, who she was with, what thoughts invaded the mind of her killer before he ended her life. It was quick, painless. He did not terrify her or let her suffer. 

He loved her. This is as clear to Grissom as the blood spattered on the shower wall. 

Grissom feels his desire to see Sara and assure himself of her safety and wholeness pulling diametrically opposite from his terror at the thought of her nearness. He is not sure what would happen if she were here at this moment, only that it would be cataclysmic, catastrophic. He can hardly bear his imaginings of her, not to mention the reality of her. 

Debbie’s skin had been so cold. 

Grissom shivers, pulling uneasily at the cuffs of his sleeves. He needs to clear his head but the rhythm of work is only pulling him deeper into this strange quagmire of emotion. 

He nearly jumps in surprise as his phone vibrates against his chest. He pulls it out, sees the ID. Sara Sidle.

Sara, Sara, Sara. The only stable thread of thought in his mind for the past sixteen hours has been her name circling around and around. “Hello.”

She speaks to him, bright and curious and excited. Skin tag. Want me to come help out?

He can’t do this. Grissom is aware of something shifting, coming loose - some vital piece of him dislocated with an agonizing force and now floating, tetherless, within. 

He can’t do this.

~*~

“He’s a bastard.” Brass is pouring himself a cup of lukewarm coffee. He is a good friend, and a solid detective. Both of these skills lead him to fill the silence that is pressing down with suffocating force in the break room at this moment, Sara studying her fingernails on the couch, Grissom pressed up into the corner by the door like a boxer on the ropes. “I’ve seen my share of jealous lovers and crimes of passion. This wasn’t one of them. Dr. Lurie is a cold-hearted bastard.”

“She didn’t love him.” 

Brass sets his coffee down, and Grissom would’ve noticed the anxiety in his movements if the sound of Sara’s voice hadn’t boiled away all other observations. Grissom presses back farther into the wall.

Sara sighs, picking at her nail. “You don’t fall in love with coldness. You don’t fall in love because it works well or feels nice. You fall in love with - with heat, it’s painful, and it feels like it could pull you apart. Debbie Marlin never loved him. He knew it. That's why he was so angry. He was perfect, he had everything he wanted, but he could never have her heart.”

Brass nods, and the silence ticks away, flesh eating like a bacteria or a flea infestation. The stalwart detective finally leaves and Grissom, still folded like an origami structure into the farthest corner of the break room, prays that Sara will follow suit.

But of course - of  _ course _ \- she doesn’t. She meets his eye calmly, and what a role reversal this is, cool calm collected Sara Sidle facing down Grissom and his storm of emotions. She stops only a few inches away. He can feel the heat radiating from her body.

“Gris,” she says, and she speaks heartbreak in one syllable. She presses her palm to his chest. He can see her fingers bumping with the frantic beating of his heart.

She ducks her head down, forces him to meet her eye. Presses forward for a half of a half of a second and kisses the edge of his lips.

“Doesn’t feel very cold to me,” she whispers, and is gone. 

~*~

She isn’t an alcoholic, and .009 is maybe three beers for a woman as thin as her, no more than four. Too much to drive, surely, but hardly a bender. Not alcoholism. But carelessness.

She leans her forehead on the passenger window the whole drive to her apartment, silent, slumped over like she’s passed out. But he can see her eyes in the reflection of the glass, unblinking, staring out into the cat’s-eye yellow lights of the strip. 

Grissom parks on the sidewalk by her building. 

“You think I’m a drunk,” she says. 

He sighs, rubbing his hand over his face. He isn’t sure what he thinks but he knows what he doesn’t think. “No,” he replies calmly. “No, I think you’re… you’re not paying attention.”

She stiffens, the accuracy of his observation somehow more painful than misjudging her. “You don’t know,” she whispers, but it is a wish and not a fact. 

“Let’s get you inside,” he says.

Her place is clean and it smells like her. She doesn’t wear perfume - she knows it interferes with the work - so he knows the smell of her skin, how it shifts with her mood, how it shifts with his closeness. Grissom examines the ivy she has on her bookcase. It is verdant and huge. 

“Want something to drink?”

They both pause with the awkwardness of this question, and Grissom can’t help his smirk, and she huffs a laugh, thumping her head against the refrigerator. “A water,” he supplies, trying to keep his tone even, “would be great.”

She brings him a glass of water without ice because she knows he hates ice, and he sips it as he walks through her apartment slowly, studying it like a crime scene. “Just don’t look through the drawers,” Sara says, collapsing onto her couch with a long exhale. 

He touches the drawer handles of her dresser, smiling. Looks at the photo she has framed on top of the dresser. A young family - mother, father, and her, unmistakably her, although she looks to be maybe two years old. Next to it she’s got a photo of her Harvard graduation, grinning and gap-toothed and absolutely beautiful. 

Sara remains quiet as he works his way through her home. She understands without needing him to explain that this is her punishment, that she must endure his quiet scrutiny in payment for her recklessness. She could have died. He would have never forgiven her. 

He makes his way back to the main room and takes a seat in the armchair perpendicular to the couch. “I have to include it in your file, but I’m not writing you up and I’m not filing a report.”

Sara leans her head back against the couch and closes her eyes. “Why not?”

Grissom shifts his jaw, studying the line of her throat. He watches her swallow. “I don’t think it would help.”

She smiles slightly. “What do you think  _ would  _ help?”

Grissom shrugs. He has a few ideas - get a hobby, maybe a pet? - but he knows she will find it flippant and out of touch, so he doesn’t say anything. Instead he stands again and makes his way to her vinyl record player. It’s a turntable, and such a perfect instrument for her: meticulous, requiring scrupulous attention and a delicate ear. Grissom doesn’t bother reading the label of the record she has in there, just turns the turntable on and lifts the needle and sets it down. 

The orchestral opening is sultry, filling the room like a sweet smoke. Grissom knows it instantly - Etta James,  _ At Last _ , released 1961. 

Her voice is dark honey, and envelopes the room - Sara’s speakers are really excellent -  _ At last, my love has come along… My lonely days are over, and life is like a song… _

Grissom is urgently aware of how perfectly inappropriate it is, a savage parody of romance, and his fingers twitch immediately to lift the needle and undo his terrible mistake but that, somehow, seems like even more of an admission, so he sits frozen, rooted in his helpless indecision. 

The music is loud enough that Grissom doesn’t hear Sara coming up behind him, and he jerks forward, startled, as she slips behind him and turns the record player off.

Silence.

At length she turns, and Grissom sees her eyes glittering with humor and then she laughing, and if he thought Etta James was honey than this - the sound of Sara’s joyful laughter - is heaven itself, and he can’t help but laugh with her, because it isn’t it just hilarious, isn’t it just too perfectly hysterical, to think things could be simple with her, even just this once?

~*~

He wakes slowly, first aware of the familiar smell of her, and then the sound of her voice, softer than she’d usually speak. His consciousness gradually sharpens and he realizes she is on the phone speaking to somebody. And he remembers they were analysing the wound patterns of their latest victim to find a murder weapon.

He vaguely recalls setting his head down on his arms as she was walking him through the possible motions of the killer’s blows, but he doesn’t remember closing his eyes. He had been awake for at least thirty hours. 

“Sara.” His voice is sleep-roughened, and she gives him a nod and wraps up her conversation. Grissom is suddenly aware that two years ago she would’ve touched him: stroked his hair, maybe, or rested a hand on the back of his neck. He would’ve liked it but it also would’ve frightened him. Now things have changed; she doesn’t even come close to him, always keeps a respectful distance, always awaits his approach. Would it frighten him now, those soft hands against his face? He doesn’t think so. But it might elicit some other unprecedented response. “Sorry,” he says, rubbing at his eyes.

She shrugs. “Looked like you needed it.”

“How long have I been out?”

“An hour.” Sara glances down at her watch, arches a brow. “Two.”

Grissom straightens up, wincing as his vertebrae audibly pop. “Have  _ you  _ slept?”

She shakes her head. “Honestly I’m running on fumes at this point. We’ve - well, I’ve looked over every object in the victim’s house, and none of it matches with the wound patterns. The suspect must’ve taken the weapon with him.”

Grissom nods. Frustrating but probably correct. “We’ll look at it with fresh eyes tomorrow. Let’s call it.” He stands up, stiff and a little painful. Sara stretches her arms over her head, showing off her lean, muscular body, the swell of her breasts. He feels old. “I’ll drive you home.”

She starts to protest.

“Sara. You haven’t slept in thirty two hours. I’ll drive you.”

She is drowsing on the way back to her apartment, eyes closing and opening again every few seconds. She invites him up when he parks out front, an empty gesture of politeness, and Grissom isn’t sure what possesses him to say, “sure.”

She heats up some vegan chili and they eat on her couch, not talking much. It is not a date - the worst boyfriend in the world would do better than this - but it is intimate. And surprisingly comfortable. 

“You and Greg seem close.”

Sara pauses in lifting her spoon to her mouth and turns to stare at Grissom for a long, silent moment. “You and Sofia seem close,” she says.

Grissom thins his mouth. She should play chess. He can’t imagine anyone losing to her. “When did you start collecting records?”

“My foster brother gave them to me when I graduated. Partly a gift, partly him getting rid of shit because he decided to tour in his band overseas. I bought the turntable and system later. I’ve added records here and there since then, but I’m not a real aficionado, I don’t have that kind of ear.”

“Hm,” says Grissom, doubting that. “The speakers are good.”

They eat quietly for a few more minutes. “Is your hearing the same as it was before your surgery?”

Grissom resists the urge to whirl around in surprise. “No,” he answers. “I’ve lost some hearing. But I can hear speech sounds well enough thankfully.” Sara nods. “When did you find out?”

He does look at her now, and she shrugs one shoulder, furrowing her brow. “I don’t know. Maybe Catherine said something? Or Brass? I mean we could all tell that you couldn’t hear well. But we didn’t know about the surgery until after.”

They lapse into silence again. Grissom finishes his bowl of chili and stands, sees that Sara is also done, and takes both bowls to her sink. He doesn’t need to clean them but he does, and maybe he’s buying time or maybe he’s just polite. 

“Is this you… making friends with me?” Sara is standing on the other side of the counter, leaning on it heavily. Exhausted. But she looks at him openly, without anger or pain. 

Grissom traces his teeth with his tongue. “What do you mean?”

“Will I be like your new Catherine now? Eating food together. Talking about the cases. Whatever.”

Her perception of his relationship with Catherine is a little bit lean, but mostly Grissom smiles because no, it will never be with Sara like it was with Catherine. The fact that Sara doesn’t know this is sad but also endearing. “I’d like us to be friends,” Grissom says.

Sara hums, looking out the window. The sun is rising. “Sometimes it seems like you can’t stand me.”

“Sometimes I can’t,” Grissom replies immediately. Sara looks at him, her eyebrows knitting together. “But I’ve always… respected you.” He breaks off, drying first one bowl and then the other. Respect is not the word he’s looking for. “I’ve always…” He fumbles for a moment, and then he realizes that the word he is looking for is ‘love’, he has always loved her, always always always. 

But of course he can’t say that.

“No matter how… tense… things have gotten, I’ve never wanted you gone,” he says.

Sara presses her lips together to keep from smiling, her cheeks going pink. Grissom clears his throat and puts her bowls away.

“I should go,” he says, making his way to the door. “Get some sleep.”

~*~

After she tells him her worst story, he makes himself useful tidying her kitchen and giving her a chance to compose herself. When he comes back to the armchair she’s folded up in he’s surprised to find her asleep, slumped uncomfortably to the side.

He wakes with her a hand to the shoulder, and tucks one arm under her knees, the other under her arms. She is lighter than he expects. She tucks her forehead against his neck, and her skin is hot, her breath is hot where it curls against his clavicle. He lays her on the bed and pulls the comforter down and takes off her shoes.

“What are you doing?” she whispers.

He pulls the blanket up over her body. “Putting you to bed,” he says.

He sits on the mattress for a moment. She is holding his hand, stretching out his fingers, touching the lines in his palm. Her thumb is strong and soft where it smooths across his knuckles. “I don’t know if I can do this,” she says softly.

Grissom feels an irrational anxiety and quells it. Waits.

There are fresh tears in her eyes when she looks up at him. “I don’t know if I can be your friend. I love you too much. It hurts too much.”

He feels a bolt of anger, an impulse to grab her shoulders and shake her and say, no it doesn’t, no you don’t, I have been doing this for years and I’m fine! But he isn’t sure that’s what he wants at all - to have her as inured to her own suffering as he has become, happy to break her own heart. The struggle must be clear on his face because she raises her hand to touch him comfortingly, tracing his eyebrow, tracing his lips. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he says, and it is true.

“Maybe we aren’t meant to be close,” she says. “Maybe some people should just be separate.”

Grissom drops his head, pulling his hand free from her grasp. He pulls at a crease in his trousers. “I don’t want to lose you.”

“I know,” she says. And he believes that she does know.

His heart is thumping. He knows that this is important, this is an axis point of history - a pivot. Things will be changed by whatever he says next, they cannot remain the same. He can choose her, and give up the last pieces of himself, the last solid structures, and he will dissolve fully into love, and no part of him will be safe, will be fully his own. Or he can choose separateness, and all the parts of him she has touched will be ripped away from her as she leaves him, a raw and bloody wound that may in fact be mortal. He does not want to choose. He cannot bear to lose her. 

She sits up in bed, puts one hand on his cheek, the other on his shoulder. Turns him towards her and rests her forehead to his. “It’s okay,” she says, and he realizes she is asking him to choose to let her go. “You’ll be okay. I’ll be okay.”

She is as afraid as he is. 

“No,” he says, tilting forward, using his nose to nudge her face up, kissing her once, twice. “I won’t be.”

She pulls away for a moment, drawing an uneven breath. He waits, hating it, his hands shaking, but she has waited for five years - he can wait for five seconds. She closes her eyes, turns, seals her mouth to his. Thank god. 

She is the ocean, beautiful and rich with life, enveloping him. He sinks. He swims deep. 

FIN


End file.
